FPS Glossary: Griefers, Hackers, TK'ers, and Aimbots

Griefer: or "one who causes grief"--Similar to a team-killer, or TK’er. The griefer is one who kills their own team instead of focusing on team objectives. The griefer, like a cyberbully, is interested in irritating and infuriating other players and is the most anti-social of players, he is the anti-player. Though they may be skilled and knowledgeable, the griefer uses this to willfully sabotage the enjoyment of the game for others. For instance: blocking teleports, blocking doorways, blocking spawn points, just causing mischief for other players. If everyone's good time is ruined then the griefer has won. A griefer drives players mad and causes trouble for administrators who have the burden of banning and blocking them from their servers.

Hacks -or Common hack accusations or “hackusations”: In first-person shooter people often blame others for getting killed repeatedly. Rather than acknowledge skill on the other part of the player—which is sometimes warranted, the player may cry, “hacker.” Some common hackusations are: aimbots, glitching, or wall-glitching, or wall-hacking. Read on for more descriptions.

click to enlarge

Wall-Peering Is Legitimate while Wall-Glitching Is Not

Wall-peering: This is a more controversial realm of supposed video game hacking because some more advance playing techniques actually call for peering around a wall. You reduce visibility and vulnerability while getting a line-of-sight to the enemy without becoming an easy target. Games actually include buttons to lean left or right, so it is hard to call this hacking. Using a wall for cover is an advanced maneuver, especially in urban warfare, and it requires moderate skill to attain. Peering around a wall from a prone or crouched position can be a good tactical strategy to get line-of-sight while maintaining cover. In PC gaming these keystroke maneuvers often mean the difference between intermediate and expert players. Combine this with map knowledge, team tactics and weapons exploits and you've got yourself an expert gaming clan.

What Is Wall-Glitching? (a.k.a Map-Glitching, or Glitching)

However, what wall-hacking is, also called "map-glitching," and sometimes called wall-glitching-- is positioning yourself behind or through a wall, triggering a map or wall glitch that will expose a hole in the map or wall. It is more correctly called an exploit than a hack, since it takes advantage of bugs in game, not modifying the game to create an a advantage. That actually makes it a lot harder to bust people doing it, since PunkBuster and other anti-cheat sotware can't look for extra software.

Cheaters look for a “glitch” in the wall, usually a hole in the texture-mesh of the map, that gives one a look through a wall without being seen from the other side, thus making one neigh-invulnerable to attack. People will cry “map-glitching,” “wall-glitching,” or just plain “glitching.” and players can be caught doing this in spectator mode by diligent admins. This cheat depends on the breaks in code or texturing, literally the wrinkles in the fabric of the map, to look-through: fascinating from a video-game programming perspective, but an annoying source of video game hacks. Player coded maps, especially in early releases, tend to have more glitches and exploits. A map with less testing will obviously have more holes.

Note: the author learned about this while playing many hours of Ghost Recon, COD and Halo with expert players from around the world.

TK's, TK'ers, or Teamkilling: What is a team killer? One of the most annoying scourges of online multiplayer action shooters, a team killer is someone who, during a team match of some kind, say capture the flag, team death match, or co-op modes like in L4D, turns his weapon on his fellow players. Fratricide, or Friendly Fire, claims real lives, so that it will accidentally happen in a game with dramatically lower consequences is not uncommon. The problem is if this is seemingly done deliberately for fun. Players who take their gaming a little more seriously will not tolerate this. Team killing is frowned upon, and it doesn’t make for much more than sophomoric amusement at best. See also griefer meaning "one who causes grief."

click to enlarge

Aimbots- An aimbot is just what it sounds like. It’s a robot that helps you aim. OK not like a robot that holds your mouse: it’s actually a flat-script programming code that will give you higher accuracy so you can spray indiscriminantly while getting the results of an expert marksman. Some servers actually scan the code of their users for cheats like this i.e. Punkbuster. This is a frowned upon and unnecessary cheat, but some people just have to win at everything don't they?

Note that you don't need to hack or exploit or TK to earn the hatred of your fellow players. Our next articles covers play styles and tactics, some of which are guaranteed to annoy, and can get you banned from some servers.